Cities Can Be Much Larger

whoa. https://t.co/ieicwjVFFr (ht @pmarca) pic.twitter.com/FoLZjwnsV1

— Michael Irvine (@Mjirv) January 12, 2016

If you have bullet trains and hyperloops connecting to Penn Station, can New York City be much much larger? The affordable housing issue kind of goes away with that.

Urbanization is one of the solutions to climate change. More people living in big cities is a good idea from the environmental viewpoint.

The Ultimate Megacity: 100 Million People

San Francisco's Fog Over Growth

the advantages of agglomeration. Put lots of highly skilled, highly productive, highly innovative people together in the same place and the economic gains are huge. ...... on the whole it’s fair to say that San Francisco hasn’t exactly embraced the role of boomtown. There are voter-imposed limits on office construction, new housing developments usually face protests and litigation, and local politics boasts a strong contingent of “progressives” whose main goal seems to be keeping the city from changing. ..... homeowners favor zoning ordinances and other growth restrictions because they keep house prices up. ...... 65 percent of the city’s housing units are rentals, and 75 percent of those are subject to rent control. Most of the San Franciscans who oppose new development do so apparently not to maximize the value of their property but to minimize the odds that they will be forced out of their apartments or otherwise priced out of the city. ....... growth restrictions restrict growth not just locally but on a national level .......

lowering the regulatory constraints on new housing in just San Francisco, San Jose and New York to the level of the median city would lift U.S. gross domestic product by 9.5 percent

....... land-use regulations were also driving up inequality and reducing economic mobility

Marc Andreessen's For Profit Idea

It's no easier to run something to breakeven as a non-profit than a for-profit. In fact it's almost certainly harder, for talent reasons.

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) January 12, 2016

@pmarca And that is why the best cure poverty "programs" will be ambitious tech startups getting into things like digital and micro finance.

— Paramendra Bhagat (@paramendra) January 13, 2016

@pmarca On that I have an idea I'd like to pitch you.

— Paramendra Bhagat (@paramendra) January 13, 2016

Uber Disrupts The Curry Business

Uber is disrupting Indian curry shops in London. https://t.co/L7YwY74cFb pic.twitter.com/ft8QqHkrYi

— Michael Hendrix (@michael_hendrix) January 12, 2016

Ray Kurzweil

""We won't experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate)"......... The Law of Accelerating Returns also explains exponential advancement of life (biology) on this planet. Looking at biological evolution on Earth, the first step was the emergence of DNA, which provided a digital method to record the results of evolutionary experiments. Then, the evolution of cells, tissues, organs and a multitude of species that ultimately combined rational thought with an opposable appendage (i.e., the thumb) caused a fundamental paradigm shift from biology to technology. The first technological steps — sharp edges, fire, the wheel — took tens of thousands of years. For people living in this era, there was little noticeable technological change in even a thousand years. ..... By 1000 A.D., progress was much faster and a paradigm shift required only a century or two. In the 19th century, we saw more technological change than in the nine centuries preceding it. Then in the first 20 years of the 20th century, we saw more advancement than in all of the 19th century. Now, paradigm shifts occur in only a few years' time. The World Wide Web did not exist in anything like its present form just a decade ago, and didn't exist at all two decades before that. As these exponential developments continue, we will begin to unlock unfathomably productive capabilities and begin to understand how to solve the world's most challenging problems.

There has never been a more exciting time to be alive."